Awesomeethan1205 wrote:
If we don't have enough staff, why don't we nominate people who intend on working hard on the wiki, and not screwing around or trolling people for staff positions? There are quite a few people on this wiki that deserve the promotion.
"They'd" probably need to create exceptions to their guidelines entirely to bring new staff in. If I was to use you as an example, there'd be an issue with your previous 1-day ban for spamming/swearing.
There's also the fact that you'd have to be more active than you are currently if you were to make the "be here at least once a week"-type quota. Out of the seven days you've been on the wiki so far in 2017, that's only been 6/12 weeks. You'd have to double up if the current expectations were kept.
But that's not meant to be taken critically, that's just under the assumption the current expectations for staff members were used for you. Most staff at the moment are basically on hiatus, leaving only Brick here with technically 9/12 weeks for his 16 separate days, so there's really already an exception.
However, at the same time: at the given moment, and thus far ever since Gray's leaving, the wiki has been on a notably downhill slope. It seems most likely that the wiki will continue to be in constant change of management if people were taken in constantly and never actually get better, but that the wiki will also just die out if there is not an actually active staff team of more than one.
Brick is being put in a position that Gray was in, and may feel critical of himself if he was to "fail" at the responsibility he was given. Maybe with Hunited's supposed return and other staff member's supposed only "temporary" hiatuses will the wiki mend on its own.
Really, you have to look at it from two sides:
- There is an obvious lack of staff. More active people need to be brought in.
- There's been many attempts of bringing more active people in. Does doing it even more actually solve anything? At some point they've all gone on with their lives, or ended up just dying off during their nomination.
- The wiki has some really bad articles that need to be cleaned up. A staff member could do this easily.
- Staff power is not needed in most cases when it comes to housekeeping. Valued community members being able to step up to the occasion to revert vandalism and guide inexperienced editors is just as valuable as having staff for that. If anything, I think good community members may be more valuable than staff members.
- The wiki's main two events—Idea of the Week and Sprite of the Week—are basically shutdown. New staff members with more time on their hand would be able to revitalize these, which could in turn bring out the best of the entire community with more inspiration for better content and community interaction.
- Other things could be prioritized instead of these events. By not prioritizing the events until sufficiently able to, then more time can be put into fixing issues with the wiki and not having to worry about constant stuff on the side to handle. Plus, the wiki is currently not with a wide variety of sprites or ideas to choose from.
- There's not really an active staff team.
- There's not really an active community.
EDIT: These are not responses to each other as to why more staff is or is not needed. There are arguments that could be made by either side about a subject. Theoretically, either way can be beneficial and both ways can be detrimental. There's more to it than just "we need more staff," and there's more ways to handle the issues than just having more people in power.
Of course, I am biased due to the fact that I come from a community that only had one staff member for a while, and then only had two for a while, and then has only had three for quite a while. It's a far different community, of course, but I don't hold much value for things that I can attain elsewhere.
Communities are not one-dimensional. As such, there's no reason to be linear. Things do not happen in a straight line with predesignated outcomes. Social interaction branches off itself, and communities are all about social occurrence.
But I think there's a lot of thought that has to be put in to situations as these. It's not just black or white and possibly gray. If anything, it's closer to a four-dimensional color "wheel" that also includes your saturation, opacity, hue, lightness, etc, and a CMYK toggle.
It is not possible to continue to deduce the solution every new season as "we need new staff." There may as well be people qualified for the role, but there is far more to consider. Maybe the wrong people were brought in at the wrong time, or maybe it's time to stop reaching for the same "solutions" and try something else. In the end, I hope for the best possible outcome for this community.